Run Your Laptop On Nuclear Energy 607
Reader zymano points to this news.com artcle on innovations in portable power sources. Would you feel comfortable with a radioactive power source inside your laptop or cellphone?
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Run Your Laptop On Nuclear Energy
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Single tasking: Just Say No.
Command post! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Command post! (Score:3, Funny)
Radiation in my laptop? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, as long as it's not that yellow radiation.
Re:Radiation in my laptop? (Score:5, Interesting)
MICROWAVE RADIATION IS NON IONIZING!!!! The reason that gamma rays and x rays are harmful is because they have enough energy to mess up your dna and such, which can potentially cause cancer and other problems. Microwave radiation has none of these problems. Microwaves have far less energy than optical light. They can't ionize anything.
The only way RF can cause damage is by overheating. But 15 mw of power from a WAP or a card isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
An atomic pile the size of a walnut? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:An atomic pile the size of a walnut? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:An atomic pile the size of a walnut? (Score:4, Informative)
If I'm not mistaken, this happened when the foundation expansion first encountered the decaying empire.
Jimeny Jilickers (Score:3, Funny)
why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:why not? (Score:4, Informative)
So haveing somehting like this in a cell phone or a laptop really wouldn't bother me.
Re:why not? -- Won't work for Laptops (Score:3, Informative)
Looking at a handy dandy table of the isotopes gives a half-life of 92 years and a decay energy of 67 keV per disintegration for Nickel-63. Also, it has an atomic mass of 63 g/mol. 1 Joule equals 6.24E+15 keV, so to produce 1 Joule of energy you would need:
6.24E+15 kEV/67 keV/disintegration = 9.32E+13 disintegrations
One Watt is a J/s, so to produce a Watt of power you would need 9.32E+13 disintegrations per second. So, how much Nickel-63 is needed to get this many disintegrations per second?
9.32E+13 / (1-exp(1/2903299200*ln(2)) = 3.90E+23 atoms
(Note 2903299200s = 92 years). Dividing by Avogadros Number and multyplying by the atomic mass gives a mass requirement of 40.8g for each Watt. A typical laptop computer consumes ~50 Watts giving a required mass of ~2 kg.
While a bit high, this probably isn't too bad, especially since future technologies can probably lower the power requirement to 10-20 Watts. However, the above calculations assume 100% efficiency. I have no idea what the actual efficiencies are, but they are likely to be less than 50% since the proposed battery uses a mechanical process to produce the electricity. This alone would double the mass. In addition this is only the mass of the nickel. The other components and any shielding are likely to double or triple the mass, so the overall battery would likely weigh 8-12 kg (18-26 lbs). Much too heavy for a laptop.
This is not to say there aren't many very low-power applications for which such a battery would be ideal, but a laptop isn't one of them unless the power requirement can be dropped below about 10W.
obligatory Ghost busters quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory Ghost busters quote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:obligatory Ghost busters quote (Score:3, Funny)
More importantly.... (Score:5, Funny)
Inside a cell phone or laptop near my balls! Have to get some lead boxers...
Re:More importantly.... (Score:2, Funny)
Why? scared that superman is gay or something?
Re:More importantly.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Batteries which capture the electrons given off during some sorts of radioactive decay are old hat. If the article is to be believed, this is something very different. Also from the article:
``Converts the energyRe:More importantly.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pacemakers already have radioactive batteries.
Re:More importantly.... (Score:5, Funny)
Kintanon
Re:More importantly.... (Score:5, Funny)
Did you forget once?
Re:More importantly.... (Score:3, Funny)
No...They couldn't find the crankshaft.
Atleast he doesn't get cranky anymore...
Re:More importantly.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More importantly.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:More importantly.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously you want some boxers made of this stuff [yahoo.com].
It's a joke, people...The N word shouldn't automatically provoke FUD when it's mentioned...
New regulations (Score:3, Insightful)
What Fry would say... (Score:5, Funny)
(On being scanned by some radiation emiting device)
"Ouch, my sperm"
heheh
Re:What Fry would say... (Score:2, Funny)
"Funny, it doesn't hurt this time"
It could save you lots of money! (Score:2, Funny)
Why, you'd save a fortune in glo-in-the-dark condoms
Potential Risk? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see them being so quick to remove a similar hurdle for nuclear fuel.
But, hey, if they make nuclear powered cell phones, the radiation would treat the supposed cancer risk. Right?
-R
Re:Potential Risk? (Score:3, Informative)
Why not? What are you going to do with a radioactive lump of stuff? I suppose you could try to choke someone with it or shoot people with beta particles...
This isn't the same sort of material that gets used in nuclear weapons; it's just isotopic material which decays with a characteristic timescale so that a steady stream of particles shoot away from it. You can use the momentum imparted by these particles to power a small generator - sort of like water turning a turbine in a dam or something (not exactly, but you get the picture...).
That would be... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That would be... (Score:5, Funny)
And if you take it on the airplane, the press confererence:
Reporter: "What was the cause of the explosion?"
NTSB Guy: "Windows. If only he used linux...or AT LEAST MacOS X...this disater could've been averted."
Two hours later, at the White House...
Bush: "We have found that the explosion was caused by Windows. By making Windows, Microsoft is a terrorist organization. This morning, troops invaded the evil leader Bill Gates's compound in Redmond."
Two Weeks Later:
Reporter: "Have you found Gates?"
Rumsfeld: "We have Special Forces scouring the area, but we haven't found him. But in order to follow our current policy on the War on Terror, we'll now accuse a random country of being Evil. (::Rumsfeld walks over to a lottery tumbler::) This year's "Evil Nation" is... MADAGASCAR! Alrighty. Now, then. You know the drill. Madagascar currently is in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Now go back to your news bureaus and begin the punditry. That is the end of this conference."
That prominent, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes. A literal definition.
And speaking of literal definitions:
Error #10012 - Meltdown eminent."
I think you mean "Meltdown imminent," rather than, say, to substitute, meltdown "prominent," "lofty," or "well-placed;" although I will admit such a catastrophe would be pretty egregious.
Even more danger? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Even more danger? (Score:2, Funny)
Nuclear laptop (Score:2)
Leet (Score:5, Funny)
With a nuclear powered notebook on my lap I could save a load of money on future child support payments.
The ultimate mod... (Score:5, Funny)
News flash. (Score:2)
like the GhostBusters (Score:2)
So would I with a nuclear-powered laptop (how much battery life do you have? Oh, a couple thousand years).
As long as I won't drop it (you'll notice if I will).
cheers
Nuclear powered cellphone (Score:3, Insightful)
In all seriousness if the manufacturers can guarentee that its safe I'm all for portable power that lasts 200 years.
Re:Nuclear powered cellphone (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw that. I want the manufacturer, a government agency, and a dozen or so independent non-profit organizations to guarantee it is safe. I mean, we saw well letting the company tell us what is safe worked with tobacco.
But do that, and yeah, I'd use one.
Re:Nuclear powered cellphone (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this is one of the few cases wherein if you don't trust the gub'mint (setter of standards for rad-leakage) or the corporates (laptop manufacturer), you can just as easily verify for yourself.
Alpha: If you're not convinced from the laws of physics that alphas will be stopped by the casing of your laptop, build a cloud chamber with some dry ice and alcohol, and sit your laptop on top of it. Observe the lack of straight fat traces emanating from your laptop.
Beta: Ditto. You can also build a detector for charged particles out of gold leaf and leave it next to your laptop for a few hours, or you can just eyeball your cloud chamber for longer traces with occasional kinks as electrons are deflected in the medium.
Gamma: OK, your cloud chamber won't work as well here, so drop $300 for a pocket geiger counter [scientificsonline.com] from a place like Edmund Scientific. (It slices, it dices, it's something no kid who grew up during the Cold War should be without! :-)
Cloud chambers [geocities.com] are easy to build [berkeley.edu], and fun to watch. Get an old radium-dial watch or clock, place a blue LED next to it, and you've got yourself a "nuclear lava lamp".
Case modders alert! You could replace the top flat part of a PC with it and the cool air from the base of the chamber would ooze down into your case, providing a little bit of extra cooling. along with one hell of a l33t case mod - permanently mount your rad-source in the middle of the chamber, mask off and paint a "radioactive" symbol in the plexiglass cover, with a small source directly beneath the center of the rad-symbol, and illuminate it with a one of those traffic-light/borg-cube-green LEDs, and bring a few blocks of dry ice to the LAN party! W00T!
OK, back on topic. The bottom line is that measuring the amount of ionizing radiation leacking from a nuke-powered laptop is trivial, and if you compare the (lack of) radiation coming from your laptop from the (big pile of) background radiation coming from the bricks in your house, the glaze on your grandma's dishes, and the potassium in that bundle of bananas, or just from living in the Rockies, you just might learn something about risk assessment - something about which those in the knee-jerk anti-nuclear movement would prefer to keep you in the dark.
Re:Nuclear powered cellphone (Score:3, Interesting)
That's just great. Someone drops his pager in a movie theatre, and the damn thing beeps for two centuries before someone can find and kill it.
Also, who wants a laptop that has to be disposed of as nuclear waste? It's fine for pacemakers and that sort of thing--there don't need to be that many in circulation (pun not intended) and nobody is going to be trading in for a newer model every eighteen months.
Finally, have you seen some of the stupid things that people do to their consumer electronics? (Backing over a laptop in the driveway comes to mind.) This could lead to releases of potentially hazardous levels of radiation--perhaps inadvertant ingestion of radioactive material from a small leak in the casing.
Radio Waves and Radioactivity (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd feel safe if... (Score:5, Funny)
So long as it wasn't running Windows.
Not for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember all the mutant freak babies that were born in some Nevada towns after the Army was performing nuclear tests back in the 40's?
Sure this thing sounds safe but are you going to risk giving birth to a retard or a one armed baby when they really don't have any conclusive studies yet? I'm not.
Not near my head or my other head (Score:2)
Snow Crash!! (Score:2)
What do do with them... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What do do with them... (Score:3, Insightful)
The worst part is you're not even harmless. The lack of progress in the battery field due to people being afraid of flamable liquid, and anything that contains the word 'nuclear' or 'radiation' means we're going to keep dumping cadmium and mercury into landfills. It's kneejerk comments like yours based on false information that cause these new technologies to be dismissed without consideration.
For the sake of the rest of us, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't talk.
Re:What do do with them... (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Uses beta particles. Non dangerous[1]
2. Think abou it: All energy used (battery dead) means NO radation remaining. It'd be no worse, than say, lead.
[1] Okay, iif you breath in a lot it my casue problems, but it's not going to make your kids have green skin.
Re:What do do with them... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like regular batteries? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think its okay to dispose of them like those others. Probably safer to drop them in the trash than regular nicads..
Re:What do do with them... (Score:3)
Kintanon
Radioactivity in my lap? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait... that means I'd actually have to get NEAR a real-life female first...
heh... (Score:2)
What, me worry? (Score:2)
Heck, no. I simply wouldn't feel safe knowing that there were hazardous materials [epa.gov] inside my computer...
(runs and hides from the Radioactive Boogeyman)
Another Beta Test (Score:3, Funny)
All kidding aside, I see major problems convincing portable electronics users that they'll be safe with ooooohhhhh.... "Radioactive" devices in their cars.
It's sad, because no one seems at all concerned with the energy already put off by cell phones and the batteries could be an awesome step torward better power management.
I wonder what the disposal concerns and criteria are?
Re:Another Beta Test (Score:3, Insightful)
Just for grins, count the number of "death rays" you have around you right now. Perhaps you know them as "lasers". Remember to check you local CD and DVD players.
Nuke batteries (Score:5, Funny)
If I may ask a simple question here: As much as what ?
Re:Nuke batteries (Score:3, Insightful)
Beta particles... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Beta particles... (Score:4, Interesting)
I fear... (Score:5, Funny)
Radiation (Score:5, Informative)
The radiation mentioned in the article is just the emission of beta particles -- in other words, ordinary electrons. At the energy levels associated with atomic decays they would be stopped by a thick piece of paper, to say nothing of human skin.
So this actually sounds like quite a novel and safe approach. It's not like they're shoving a few pounds of plutonium into the thing and trying to get energy from the heat -- like NASA does on space probes.
More info from Cornell (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/11.7.0
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct02/cant
It seems to me that this should be safe. They note in the article that they are only creating batteries which use Beta radiation, which is too weak to hurt you. If that is true, then yeah, I would use them, if it meant my laptop or cellphone would last for 10 or 20 years.
Re:More info from Cornell (Score:3, Funny)
Soooo..... You'd be willing to have the same laptop or cell phone for 20 years? Talk about being behind the technology curve!
alpha, beta, gamma (Score:5, Informative)
Re:alpha, beta, gamma (Score:4, Interesting)
As was pointed out above, beta particles (electrons) can be easily stopped with thin sheets of metal which introduce large electrical interaction cross-sections. Alpha particles are too large to penetrate the skin to a significant depth and are only dangerous if ingested.
When I was a physics TA in college, we worked with radioactive pellets for some labs, and I was told that I actually had to tell the students that they 'should not eat the radiation sources'. I'm sure several of them would have tried if I hadn't warned them...
Atomic Batteries and Medical Physics 101 (Score:5, Informative)
Medical Physics
The damage done to human tissue is a function (~linear) of the amount of energy deposited by the radiation into the tissue.
This is a function itself of:
1) The amount of energy depositied by the radiation per unit of path length.
2) The length of the path in the body.
Also of interest in practical situations is this also applies to shielding i.e. if the shielding is such that the energy is enirely deposited in the shield materiel then the radition is fully shielded. If not then you have attenuated the radiation.
On one hand massive particles like Alpha Particles are 'safer' because they deposit energy quickly (they interact fairly strongly with matter), so can be stopped by very small masses like paper/foil/skin epidermis. On the other hand high energy Alpha Particles can be very dangerous if not shielded because they can carry a lot of energy into the body due to thier mass, and deposit it there as the tissue stops the particle.
At the other extreme Gamma Radiation is 'bad' because it doesn't lose energy very easily (becasue they don't interact as strongly with matter) so they cannot easily be shielded, but will at least not deposit the whole of the energy in the tissue but pass through it. Unfortunatley of course gamma radiation is highly energetic so it can still deposit a lot of energy.
So the risk of medical damage from a radioactive source is function of
1) The strength of the emmission
2) The type of emmission
3) The amount of shielding between the source and you
It is not just the radition type.
As already stated the biggest risk is when radioactive substances are ingested such that they stay in the body for some time, as this increase the energy depositied into the tissue - alpha emission is particularly bad here because it will deposit the whole of the energy into the surrounding tissue.
In this instance you may well find that a low energy beta source is a better choice, because with a low energy alpha source the raditation may not even make it out of the source's casing.
Atomic Batteries
For the interested 'atomic' batteries generaly work by using a radioactive source to heat a shield material around it. This heat can then be turned into electricity by putting a thermocouple matrix in the shield material, with the hot junction in the material, and the cold junction outside.
Now in this case we need a lot of energy in the shield material, but enough to get out of the sources casing, so low energy beta is good here.
It is safe, because the whole point of the design is that the radiation is shielded, thats how you recover the energy into electricty. You will get very very little external radiation from a well designed atomic battery.
This is not new technology, deep space probes have been using them for years because solar cells would be useless in the outer solar system
The characteristics of this sort of power generation is that it is physically small, long lasting but low current. This is ideal for portable devices, but not usable really for transport or power devices.
Practically you would probably need another battery like LiIon such that the LiIon cell is trickle charged all the time, but can supply surges of power.
This would be great in a cellphone where the LiIon battery would supply the high power needed for transmiting during the calls, and the atomic battery would supply enough to charge the LiIon and do standby - phone not got enough charge, just leave it for an hour. Conceptually you may never need to charge the phone, or change the battery, it could be fitted for life in the phone.
The challenge is finding the right materials and making it mass producable. On space probes its easy because you can cool the cold junction in the vacuum of space and make it efficient, plus you don't really care about the cost or making 1000's of them a week.
Re:Atomic Batteries and Medical Physics 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
Non-thermal atomic batteries (Score:3, Informative)
See U.S patent 4,835,433 "Apparatus for direct conversion of radioactive decay energy to electrical energy".
This technology has been demonstrated to be an order of magnitude more efficient that RTGs.
Re:alpha, beta, gamma (Score:3, Informative)
Betas come in a range of flavours. They are indeed electrons, ejected at high speed from radioactive nuclei. The amount of kinetic energy that they carry depends on the radioactive species under consideration. Phosporous-32 is quite potentially dangerous, it emits betas with an energy of about 690 keV (IIRC). These will penetrate skin quite easily. I mention P-32 because it is frequently used in molecular biology. In the lab, compounds containing P-32 must be stored encased in plexiglass (thickness varies with concentration and quantity of isotope), and shielding employed by researchers.
The batteries that they're working on at Caltech are based around Nickel-63. Ni-63 has a beta decay energy of up to 17 keV. That's pretty pathetic, and it won't penetrate skin. It's actually annoying for researchers for a different reason: you can't detect it with a Geiger counter because the weak betas won't penetrate the window at the end of the Geiger tube. If you spill a compound containing Ni-63, it's harder to find all of it when you clean up. (P-32, on the other hand, gives quite a nice signal.)
So: Alphas are harmless outside the body, and bad if ingested. Betas may or may not be harmless outside the body (Ni-63 is, P-32 isn't) and are bad if ingested--though not as bad as alpha emitters. The section of the article to which you allude was badly written, but it wasn't as far wrong as it could have been.
Not forever (Score:3, Informative)
10^33 [bu.edu] years from now.
Radioactive Batteries? (Score:2)
What it means... (Score:2, Funny)
Not necessarily dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
I would definitely be cautious using a battery like this, but I wouldn't be automatically opposed to trying it. Besides, if lots of radiation was leaking out of this thing, then that would be a pretty inefficient battery, wouldn't it?
Geez (Score:2)
Not a nuclear engineer... (Score:5, Informative)
So, the answer to the question in the post? Yes, I would(!!) feel comfortable walking around with what these guys are talking about in my pocket.
The fact is, you get more radiation from a digital watch than you do living as near a CANDU reactor as you're allowed to live (about a kilometer). These people don't screw around. In the current global climate of anti-nuclear-anything, they'd be idiots to even contemplate cutting a corner. And, hell, most of these people are good people - the sorrow they'd feel at anybody having died because of their designs would be real, and it would be deep. As far as the companies are concerned, you can't have a plant meltdown and then just rebuild it. Chances are, you have to build an entirely new facility somewhere else, since the original area is waaay too contaminated.
I fully expect that the people working on these batteries have the same mind set - they just don't dick around. (And from the papers I've read, that does seem to be the case.)
Re:Not a nuclear engineer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Slight mistake in the article... (Score:3, Interesting)
indistinguishable from magic (Score:4, Insightful)
ugh, radiation bad, me no like radiation. it heap bad juju; it give Grog cancer.
Meanwhile, Grog likes woodstove and fireplace. Note that the pleasure of such heat sources is infrared radiation. There is a lot of difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.
the article says these devices would use BETA radiation. Whazzat? fast electrons. If they won't penetrate skin, they won't cause mutations, they won't give Grog cancer.
Slashdotters SHOULD know better. If we're half as smart as we think ourselves, then we ought to be able to distinguish between beta radiation, infrared radiation, etc. and also the safe energy levels of each type of radiation
Folks, we have a leadership role here. If we know the techie background to say whether something is safe or not, we ought to apply it to this kind of stuff.
Re:indistinguishable from magic (Score:5, Informative)
You're right; we ought to know the basics about different types of radiation--it should be part of every science curriculum. As for knowing safe levels, well...that's a little different.
Deciding whether or not the beta emitter in the battery is actually 'safe' or not requires a little bit of background knowledge. High energy beta emitters like P-32 are actually potentially dangerous. P-32 betas will go quite a distance in air, and even to a significant depth in skin. P-32 in a thin lead lining is even more dangerous, because betas slowed down by lead emit x-rays and gammas.
On the other hand, the source for these batteries (not mentioned in the original article) is Ni-63. Its maximum beta decay energy is about 3% that of P-32, and its betas will be stopped by a sheet of paper or the dead layer of skin. But who here has decay energies memorized? I know I had to look up Ni-63.
So: not all betas are harmless, because not all betas are created equal. Actually, linear accelerators are used to generate high energy betas (up to about 20 MeV) for use in clinical radiation therapy (for cancer treatment). Those little guys can still deliver an appreciable dose down to about ten centimetres in to a tissue volume.
So--you're right. We do have a responsibility to inform the public when we know what we're talking about. I don't think I'd feel very confident discussing safe levels of microwave or infrared exposure. Or UV, for that matter. I know quite a bit more about X-rays and gammas, since I've worked with medical physicists.
Knowledge like booze. Know your limits. Yeah, I know. It's a crappy analogy. Sue me. (But IANAL.)
Nuclear waste (Score:3, Insightful)
What the hell (Score:5, Funny)
I've got 6 monitors in my cube. What is a little radiation in my laptop? I'm probably already sterile. Woo Hoo!!!!!
Methane Powered? (Score:5, Funny)
Some researchers are also working on more efficient solar cells and methane-powered fuel cells.
Methane powered?
I can see the conversations now:
"Hang on, my cellphone battery is getting low, I have to go through the Taco Bell drive-through."
It seems to me this is a lot bigger than batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah (Score:3, Interesting)
Small nuclear power plants? We had those back in the 1970s [scifi.com].
(best -- show -- ever, except for when they "jumped the aliens")
Nice headline (Score:3, Insightful)
Does this include when I plug it into my wall outlet, the electricity from which is generated by a nuclear station?
Perhaps something along the lines of "Portable Nuclear Generator for your Laptop" would have been more appropriate. The next article could be "Portable Birth Control for Men", with the same link.
Nuclear? It'll never happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
People are scared of what RF radiation could do to them. That's RF, as in Radio Frequency. Telling them that it's non-ionizing is pointless. They only understand "radiation" and they don't want to understand any more.
Now someone is proposing a nuclear battery. I wish them luck. With so many people believing that putting a cell phone next to their heads is dangerous today, wait until interest groups discover that the battery they're using is a nuclear device.
Once again, we have what is probably a technically elegant solution being offered to a seriously ignorant public. Expect the risks to be blown entirely out of proportion while "harmless" chemical batteries are added by the ton to landfills every day. Thank-you Jeremy Rifkin. Thank-you Paul Brodur. Thank-you Nancy Wertheimer. Thank-you Rachel Carson. You and your successors have taught a generation of idiots all about fear-mongering. Now we can all pay for the wages of stupidity and political grandstanding.
Meanwhile, because of our societal phobias we'll continue making a mess of our environment.
(Rifkin: Fearmonger on Genetically modified foods. Brodur: wrote the "Zapping of America", a treatise on RF phobias and science by innunendo. Nancy Werthiemer: Co-author of a seriously flawed paper on powerline exposure and lukemia. Rachael Carson: "Silent Spring"; although her cause was reasonable, her facts were not.)
Misleading description (Score:3, Insightful)
The word Nuclear seems to have become a misnomer for anything at all involving atoms. The article you have linked to is not talking about nuclear power at all: power harvested from the nucleus is a distinct thing.
What they are doing is not making a battery out of a nuclear reactor or nuclear power source -- no fission or fusion is being used, therefore, they are not harvesting the power derived from splitting or merging nucleii, so the term nuclear would seem incorrect.
They are simply using some substance that has a certain radioactivity: it has the tendency to decay and release some energy, but other than that, is relatively harmless unless you ingest it or something (You would at least get very sick if you opened and ingested the contents of any battery, however!).
Read from the article:
You won't be glowing or sterilized if you put one of these in your lap, the danger is about as great as using an ordinary battery -- it could pop a leak and fill your lap with mercury, hydrochloric acid, or something, which would be just as bad.
Moreover, if simple radioactive decay is called nuclear because it deals with atoms, then it could perhaps be argued, that all batteries (and indeed, all power sources) are nuclear, because all electrical power sources eventually depend on generating electricity: exciting electrons, and electrons effect atoms.
It is not apparent that there is any danger with this battery that is new, that is, you can't tell by the fact that a battery uses this particular method of power generation that it would be more dangerous than any other kind of battery.
Already happening in other devices... (Score:5, Insightful)
Check it out, then tell me if this is a big deal. (it's not.)
Rob
A few rads . . . so what? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not that bad. Now if you actually had a fission plant going on, then you'd want to be concerned.
wrong headline (Score:3, Funny)
alphas, betas, and gammas OH MY! (Score:5, Informative)
Really gamma rays (ie photons) are the only form of radiation we'd have to worry about. They have such low specific ionization (# of ions created (due to photointeractions in this case) per cm trraveled that they can go right through your body...ionizing stuff which shouldn't be and making you sick (or worse).
The other two, beta (electrons or positrons) and alpha particles (essentially helium-4 w/o the electrons) have such high specific ionizations (due to their charges) that they will not penetrate past your skin. In fact, alpha particles won't even penetrate your DEAD skin! IMHO, I consider alpha particles are much safer (unless you swallow the emitter ) in that you could hold those 'batteries' in your bare hand and not have live skin be touched whereas the beta particles WOULD reach live skin.
In any case, all of this is just probability so 'safe' is a relative term. Economically, many more nuclides beta decay (specifically beta minus decay) than anything else so that is probably the real reason: easier and cheaper to get enouogh of the right nuclide...but I applaud the efforts at trying to show the general public that at least one type of radiation isn't so bad.
You can bet as soon as these decay-powered batteries are available I'll be the first in line to get one =)
--Jubedgy
Comfy! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sure, I don't mind. Holy zygotes Batman! (Score:2)
My 4th is on the way, I could avoid the knife AND get a new laptop!
Re:Nuclear powered cell phone? (Score:2)